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For Whom Are Southeast Asian Studies? 72 For Whom Are Southeast Asian Studies? Caroline S. HAU Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies Kyoto University Which audiences, publics, and peoples do Southeast Asianists address and serve? The question of “audience(s)”—real and imagined, intended and unintended—is arguably central to (re)conceptualizing the rationale, scope, efficacy, and limits of Southeast Asian Studies. It has an important bearing on what kind of topics are chosen for study, what and how personal and institutional networks and intellectual exchanges are mobilized, which dialogues and collaborations are initiated, in what language(s) one writes in, where one publishes or works, which arenas one intervenes in, and how the region is imagined and realized. After surveying the recent literature on Southeast Asian Studies, I focus on Jose Rizal’s two novels—Noli me tangere (1887)and El filibusterismo (1891)—and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983, 1991, 2006) and examine the ways in which the issue of audience(s) crucially informed the intellectual projects of the two authors, and how the vicissitudes of production, circulation, translation, and reception shaped the intellectual, political, and artistic trajectories and legacies of these three notable Southeast Asian studies texts. I will also discuss the power of these texts to conjure and call forth unexpected and unintended audiences that have the potential to galvanize Southeast Asian studies while stressing the connected histories that link Southeast Asia to other regions and the world. Keywords: Southeast Asia, area studies, nationalism, Benedict Anderson, José Rizal ASIAN STUDIES: Journal 59of Critical Perspectives on Asia For Whom Are Southeast Asian Studies? 7360 Introduction The best career advice I ever received came out of my B exam, the oral defense of my dissertation, twenty-two years ago at Cornell University. Among the toughest questions I received from my Special Committee concerned my position—in relation to a discussion in my dissertation—on the role of Philippine literature in the making, unmaking, and remaking of the nation. The question was “For whom are you writing?” Now, if you are a graduate student defending your dissertation, the answer is obvious: you are writing for the members of your Special Committee, your first readers. My committee, however, was already looking beyond the B exam to the time when the dissertation would be turned into a book, and was asking me to think seriously about where the book would be published and who its readers—imagined and actual (Rabinowitz 1977, 126)—would be. The question of audience—or, as I was soon to realize, audiences in the plural—has stayed with me all these years. The question has shaped and influenced my academic career and life decisions. The issue of audience(s) is, of course, fundamental to the study of language and literature. As Mikhail Bakhtin (1986, 95) reminds us, An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity [original underscoring)…. The work, like the rejoinder in dialogue, is oriented toward the response of the other (others), toward his [sic] active responsive understanding, which can assume various forms: educational influence on readers, persuasion of them, critical responses, influence on followers and successors, and so on. It can influence others’ responsive positions under complex conditions of speech communication in a particular cultural sphere. (95) Volume 56 (2): 2020 6174 C. HAU The question of audiences is particularly germane to Southeast Asian studies, and to area studies more generally, in light of the vicissitudes, trajectories, uncertainties, and challenges of the field. Who are the “target audiences” of Southeast Asian studies (Ostwald and Schuler 2015, 874)? Are they students, teachers, researchers, policy professionals, bureaucrats, state agencies, politicians, governments, companies, cultural workers, nongovernmental organizations and their workers, activists, the intelligentsia, the educated public, the general public, various communities, ordinary people, “the masses,” or “the people”? In college, as a student at the University of the Philippines, I was constantly reminded that my tuition was subsidized, not just by the government or by taxpayers, but also by no less than the Filipino people, and that as an Iskolar ng Bayan (scholar of the nation), I was indebted to “the people” and was expected to serve the country. More often than not, the “target audience” is (understandably) defined by Southeast Asianists based in educational institutions in the developed world as largely academic, consisting mainly of students and scholars (see, for example, Ostwald and Schular 2015, 875). These communities are quite diverse in terms of their disciplines, their areas of expertise, their methodologies, and their research interests and concerns. Given the pressures exerted on the academia by “the new quantification cult” (Mau 2019, 2), which is sadly embraced by many Southeast Asian universities, the audience is preferably one that can read and hopefully also write in English. Publishing in English, however, does not guarantee global visibility, let alone impact, as Japanese scholars have learned (Hayami 2006, 73). There exists a hierarchy in status and prestige when it comes to journal-, book-, and newspaper-publication venues. This seemingly global yet actually parochial, even exclusionary, idea of a largely Anglophone audience for prestige publications—generated out of the Anglo-American academia (see Jackson 2019)—has proven to be deeply problematical for scholars born or based in Southeast Asia (and elsewhere) who are concerned with addressing multiple sets of audiences in multiple languages. ASIAN STUDIES: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia For Whom Are Southeast Asian Studies? 7562 Conceptualizing Southeast Asian Area Studies We now know that the term “Southeast Asia” was a geographic designation before it evolved into a regional concept (Fifield 1976, 151). We know that it was a theater of World War II, the product of a division of military labor and imperial territory among the Western allies (which explains why Douglas MacArthur put the Philippine islands under his own command while Louis Mountbatten included Sri Lanka under his Southeast Asia Command) (Emmerson 1984, 7–8, 11). We know that in the postwar period, it served as a policy arena for American military and political intervention abroad (7–8) and a cultural arena of the Cold War battle for hearts and minds (Day and Liem 2010). It has since become the basis of a series of region-originating inter-state mechanisms for security and economic cooperation, for mediating political and territorial issues and disputes, and for nurturing a prospective supranational identity. It is also conceived as a “hotspot” fraught with risk, danger, and uncertainty: a hotspot for emerging infectious diseases (IRIN News 2014); a “bio-cultural hotspot” that is home to twenty percent of the world’s plant, animal, and marine species (Subramanian et al. 2011); a blue-water hotspot in terms of the consumption and wastage of surface and groundwater resources (Johnson and Lichtveld 2017, chapter 10); a hotspot of land conflicts (Roughneen 2017) and boundary, border, and territorial disputes at the local, national, regional, and international levels (see Wain 2012; Talmon and Jia 2014); a hotspot in the New Cold War between mainland China and the United States (Kaplan 2019). We know that the area studies programs in the United States and the so-called “West” (a concept that often includes Japan) evolved out of the imperative to produce knowledge about areas that are by definition “outside” and spatially (and even temporally, epistemically, and existentially) distinct from that of the researcher (Harootunian and Miyoshi 2002, 7; Cheah 2008, 55). We also know that the relationship between the area studies specialist and the area, between knower and known, is fraught Volume 56 (2): 2020 6376 C. HAU yet productive in the sense that “biopower grounds itself in the mechanism of area as a means to order, combine, separate, and classify life at a distance” (Walker and Sakai 2019, 10, 23). Claiming that one is doing area studies in one’s own area—that one is studying one’s own country or people—does not resolve the issue. It raises the vexing question not only of one’s implication in the will to knowledge and governmentality, but also, to me, the even more vexing questions of how one goes about “making- doing” (11) belonging to any community or place, what claims are made on one by places and people in that process, and whether one can belong to any place or community. Well aware of the contingency, even accidental nature of the biographical, intellectual, and political encounters that fuel interest and careers in area studies (Rafael 2003), scholars are careful to treat Southeast Asian studies as a “heuristic device” (Chou and Houben 2006, 13), a “contingent device” (Sutherland 2005, drawing on Subrahmanyam 1997, 743), a “Euro-Japanese construct” (Reynolds 1995, 420), an “intellectual site” (Mojares 1994, 139), a “theoretical problematique” offering new sets of questions and methodologies (Tadiar 1999, 18), and “a reserve of intellectual diversity” (Cribb 2005, 55). Such imperative nonetheless produces its own circles of esteem (Cribb 2005); its hierarchy of countries to study (with Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand as the “main” domains, and Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Philippines as
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